I Tested All the Permanent Outdoor Holiday Lights and Here’s What I’d Buy
I approach the ritual of installing holiday garlands with curiosity and admiration. I am endlessly baffled by the amount of time and energy people spend, risking life and limb, in extreme weather, climbing into their homes to install lights that they won’t remove until a month or two later. And why only Christmas lights? Why don’t we all put up some lights for Valentine’s Day, St. Patty’s Day, and Pride Month?
Constant outdoor lighting is a way to enjoy all the holiday hype without the dangers and annual labor costs. You install them once and leave them on for the whole year. They don’t look like regular holiday lights, but the effect is much the same: festive, colorful illumination.
Fixtures are installed under eaves or gutters and project light back onto the home. If you want, you can arrange them the same way as standard holiday lights—on a roof, for example; they will work fine anyway. Moreover, the impact of constant light dwarfs most incandescent or LED bulbs. I can light up my house like a disco ball seen from space. If this scares you, it shouldn’t: an added benefit of these lights is that you can adjust brightness, color, motion, and display time—all from an app on your phone.
Create a custom light show
Once installed, the headlights are fully adjustable. You can leave them white for most of the year and then change them up for the holidays: flashing orange and purple colors for Halloween, soft glowing pinks for Valentine’s Day, and a moving rainbow for pride.
As recently as 2023, only a few companies offered these lights and I installed the Govee version across my entire roof. Other brands have entered the market this year. I tested four of the most popular ones, including the latest version of Govee. (I also tested a set of the highly publicized Everlight bulbs , which tend to be mentioned a lot in online discussions of constant lighting systems, but I’ve excluded them from the comparison below due to their cost – sets start at $1,700, down from $99 USA. other options.)
I have found that while the design of the lights themselves certainly matters, in most cases the quality of the application is the key factor. Some apps are better at offering subtle, beautifully designed preset scenes that you can choose between. (At least one app did this very poorly.) Some apps made switching easy, while others required digging through the manual to find the right settings.
All of the kits I’ve reviewed attach to your home using 3M tape or something similar, while some units have holes so you can also use hooks or nails to attach them if you want. Last year I was very impressed with how the tape stayed in place throughout a truly brutal Pacific Northwest winter, yet came off easily when I was ready to remove it to test another device.